–Long-Term Unemployed:Quoctrung Bui charts the members of the long-term unemployed. “When you are out of work and looking for 27 weeks or longer, you become part of a group the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls long-term unemployed. The share of long-term unemployed workers hit its peak in May 2010, when 46 percent of the unemployed were long-term unemployed. It has hovered around 40 percent of the unemployed in the three years since.” Read More »

–Hours and Wages:Sarah Green talks to Youngjoo Cha and Kim Weeden about their research showing that the wage premium for longer hours is on the rise. “In the first 15 years of the period we studied, from 1979 to the mid-1990s, labor force survey data [from the Bureau of Labor Statistics] show a wage penalty for working long hours, even after adjusting wages for education and experience. Workers who put in 50 or more hours per week earned less, per hour, than comparable workers who worked a standard 40-hour workweek. This makes sense if you think about salaried workers, who are not directly paid for overtime: if you are putting in longer hours at the same salary level as a coworker, you’ll be paid less per hour. You may be rewarded indirectly, if working long hours puts you at the head of the line for a promotion or if you get non-monetary benefits out of your job. But in much of the 1980s and early 1990s, long work hours did not necessarily translate directly into high hourly pay.”

–Oil Demand:Ed Yardeni charts oil demand of developed and developing countries. “The Oil Market Intelligence (OMI) group tracks monthly global oil demand. I track the 12-month moving averages of their data to smooth out the monthly volatility. Total world demand rose to a record 91.1mbd during October. However, that’s up at a rather anemic pace of 1.3% y/y. The OMI data show that demand in the 34 advanced economies of the OECD fell 0.3% y/y last month. The growth rate among non-OECD countries has been slowing since January, from 3.8% to 3.0% during October. By the way, so far, it’s hard to see any positive impact of Abenomics on Japan’s oil demand, which has been falling for the past nine consecutive months through October. Electric power consumed by large producers rebounded earlier this year, but fell sharply during August and September. “

–House Prices:Quoctrung Bui created a chart of the distribution of home prices and asked readers for their input. “We made a graph today that we found interesting. It’s the distribution of home sales prices from September of this year from the National Association of Realtors. It shows that most homes sold for prices that, to someone living in an expensive, coastal city, seem pretty affordable. We weren’t sure if that was just our provincial, New York point of view. So we asked on Twitter what the headline should be.” Read More »

–U.S. Debt:Quoctrung Bui posts a nice chart showing who the U.S. owes money to. “If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling soon, the U.S. government won’t be able to pay its debts. Here’s who the government owes money to — all the holders of U.S. Treasury debt, broken down by category and by how much government debt they hold.”

–Dollar and Debt Ceiling:Barry Eichengreen looks at the effect on the dollar of the budget battles. “A default on US government debt precipitated by failure to raise the debt ceiling would be a very different kind of shock, with very different effects. In response to the subprime disruption and Lehman’s collapse, investors piled into US government bonds, because they offered safety and liquidity – prized attributes in a crisis. These are precisely the attributes that would be jeopardized by a default. The presumption that US Treasury bonds are a safe source of income would be the first casualty of default. Even if the Treasury paid bondholders first — choosing to stiff, say, contractors or Social Security recipients — the idea that the US government always pays its bills would no longer be taken for granted. Holders of US Treasury bonds would begin to think twice.”

–EU-U.S. Trade Deal:Aaditya Mattoo asks whether a U.S.-EU trade deal would be good or bad for the rest of the world. “The recent launch of negotiations on a transatlantic trade and investment deal has been widely welcomed by policymakers. This column warns that the aspect of the deal that provokes the greatest excitement – its focus on regulatory barriers like mandatory product standards– should evoke the greatest concern. Regional harmonisation may increase intra-regional trade yet exports from excluded developing countries could be hurt.” Read More »

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